Session: Differential Responsivity to a Model School-Based Intervention (PATHS): Individual and Contextual Influences (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

During the last two decades prevention scientists have developed a substantial list of preventive interventions that show efficacy.  However, there has been scant research to identify the neurocognitive and emotion regulatory processes, implicated as etiological factors in risk behaviors, that may moderate these effects.  Given that even the most effective preventive interventions only impact part of a universal population it is critical to understand how child-specific pre-intervention abilities affect program outcomes. This will enabing practitioners toto target certain segments of the population that are not responding to interventions and to apply new theories to test interventions.  This line of research constitutes an important frontier for prevention research given the tremendous implications for improving ultimate outcomes for otherwise disadvantaged children.

This symposium will present data from an innovative NIDA-supported preventive intervention tria of the PATHS Curriculum.  The trial is designed to identify characteristics of children in a disadvantaged urban environment that predict impact from an intervention implemented in kindergarten and first grade.  We will focus in this symposium on pre and post-kindergarten data which demonstrate strong short-term effects on recipients’ behavior relative to controls. We will also discuss contextual influences that can confound results of this type of trial but are important to consider given their ability to directly and independently influence cognition and behavior.

The first paper will report the short term effects of the PATHS intervention in kindergarten children.  After receiving about 6 months of the teacher-administered intervention, all indicators of child behavior that were collected, as well as selected cognitive measures of inhibitory control, were strongly and significantly improved at the end of kindergarten.  These results suggest that behavior can be altered in a relatively short period of time, even with adjustments for classroom and teacher influences.

The second paper will discuss neurocognitive and emotional regulatory functions that appear to moderate the effects of PATHS on kindergarten children, with controls for potential confounds.  Particular functions operate as moderators with implications for further targeting the intervention to children who do not respond as favorably as others with more intact functioning.

The third paper presents an overview of critical contextual influences (a) on the ability to discern effects of an intervention in small-scale intervention trials designed to identify moderators and mediators, and (b) directly on children’s cognition and behavior.  There are, therefore, important implications for both the research and for understanding environmental factors that influence children’s experiences with potential to themselves alter behavior.

The discussant is a senior prevention scientist who has extensively written about the interface of prevention science and neuroscience who will both review the findings presented herein and speculate on how this approach to understanding individual differences in intervention response can illuminate critical next steps in prevention science.